


at the end of all things.

by songofthestars



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms
Genre: Dark Themes but a Sweet Ending, Erik cries even in a Zombie Apocalypse, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Non-Graphic Violence, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-11 01:14:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11138292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songofthestars/pseuds/songofthestars
Summary: In a world where everything is dead, he strangely appears to her as the sign of life, a flame, a guiding light, alive and safe.





	at the end of all things.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chris--daae (AILiSeki)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AILiSeki/gifts).



**at the end of all things.**

 

 

**i.**

 

The grains of soil under her feet burn like summer heat. She can sense them through the leather of her heavy combat boots, like the drips of sweat on the red-hot skin of her neck and brow. Meg pushes a lock of black hair off her frowning forehead, and wonders for the upteenth time if the face of the man walking by her side melts behind the protection of the black mask. But he would probably prefer it so. Although, through the lens of his twisted humour, it would appear a blunder to him: for once, his face is useful and necessary; for once, his face isn't painfully different from anybody else's.

Erik is a dead man walking, and breathing, and speaking in his golden voice; but his sickly sweet smell (it reminds her somehow of the one that had come from her father's hanged body, and also something else, something sharp, that she would rather not think about) is a shroud that protects them from the _real_ deads. The true danger.

 

(“My sincere thanks to your stink of decay. It saved our ass on more than one occasion.”

“Thank the drunken god who created me as such, not me.”)

 

They push forward on the barren uphill ground, and the sunshine is hot enough to fry eggs, leaving scars of light on the withered foliage of bushes and trees. It seems to also fry those, so frail are the roots that create for them that semblance of life.

They don't know their destination; they only know that they need to run, move, search for abandoned stores where they can spend the night in and stock up (in the depths of creeks and ponds there hide dead things that grab you by your hair, clawing at your skin to eat you whole; and even with a scratch you are screwed, and are left only a handful of hours before the fever turns you into a dead walking body).

Meg pats silently the blade fastened to her belt: with it she has killed her first dead, and even the last.

“We are almost there” Erik states in a whisper cracked by a slight pant. Meg has never asked him how old he is, but he is clearly no youth. And yet he moves with a somehow innatural speed, while he plunges both his daggers into the brains of the deads that stump their way towards them. It's the ultimate danse macabre.

“It better be.” Meg's voice is concise and clear: if they find themselves in the middle of nowhere besieged by a horde of deads, they will turn into fresh meat for rotten teeth in a bat of lashes.

Yet, Erik could go away; his smell and his appearance deceive the real deads, that ignore him in their belief that he is one of them, whereas Meg's skin is undeniably alive, youthful, and she is a perfect prey. So, she fights to become Death and not dead, all snarls and clotted blood on the blade of the knife that has become as necessary to her as ballet shoes were a lifetime ago.

Erik has never gone away. He has stayed to guard her like a bony hound or an Angel of Death.

Meg doesn't know whether to be grateful to him because he is the only reason she is still alive today or not. Riddled with doubt, she keeps quiet.

 

 

**ii.**

 

The day the world ended was also the one on which she met Erik for the first time.

Paris was a kingdom of chaos, and Death marched on as her children conquered everything. On the threshold of their apartment, a man born out of a nightmare came to bring them to safety, underground and outside the long-dead city. Her mother revealed unexpected friends.

Soon the two of them were the only ones left against an empty world that threatened to overwhelm them at every step.

 

(“What's your name?”

He had hesitated for a moment. “Erik.”

“A king's name” she had sarcastically muttered.

“Among other things.”

He was right. It also meant _alone._ )

 

In her dreams, Meg still sees the blade – her own blade – give mercy to her mother after the fatal bite of a dead.

Erik had offered to do it in her place. Meg had declined firmly. “ _I_ must do it” she had explained, her voice hoarse. And so she had done.

They had no longer met other people.

 

 

**iii.**

 

She knows little about Erik; she knows that her mother met him when they were both kids, in a fair. The Living Corpse, they called him. If only they had known he was an Apocalypse omen – and maybe he really is, all bones and livid skin; too bad Meg doesn't believe in omens. She believes in what she can touch and see and smell, and her senses tell her to hold onto Erik to stay alive.

Hours are a grey and tedious film: moving, walking, killing dead people, dozing in the moments stolen from a peace that not even the night can bring. Everything divided in frugal meals and regular supplying. They break in some houses and thieve food, water, clothes, a little bit of soap and rest. They often find there unpleasant hosts, dead or as good as, but Erik's disguise helps them to send them back to the graves they belong to.

 

(The first time she kills a dead she almost throws up on her sneakers. But there is no time for horror: she lets herself be taken by apathy and runs, runs, runs.)

 

They long since understood that they are all infected: they are doomed to turn into living corpses, once their heart stops beating.

“It seems it is a destiny I cannot avoid” Erik remarks, grimly amused.

They have that in common.

 

(“Tell me you'll do it.” Meg hides her face into the sleeping bag she is resting in, her voice only just smothered.

Erik looks at her, doubtful. His golden eyes glint in the darkness like stars stolen from the night sky.

“Tell you what?”

“That you will be the one to stick one of your fancy daggers into my brain. When the time comes.”

“You see anyone else here that could carry it out?”

“If we find somebody else… _you_ do it. Understood?”

Erik nods in the shadows. “Understood.”

She doesn't know why, but she believes him.)

 

 

**iv.**

 

The Angel of Death has turned into a Guardian Angel at some point. He shields her during every aggression, he protects her in such a way that, were he another man (less distant, a distance that is in his eyes; more _alive_ , ironically), would make her think that he _cares._ Which is ludicrous – a pathetic istinct to find warmth in someone else's body even here, at the end of the world. It is animal instinct, that's it – such as the one that makes her wonder how would it be to caress those dead lips and feel them human under her touch; the one that drives her to plunge the knife again and again into dead brains, to strain at the leash and breathe a beat of life in the middle of Hell, when her heart tells her to let go.

But she has never been good at listening to her heart.

“You don't need to protect me. You're not my babysitter.”

“Aren't I?”

His tone of macabre sarcasm infuriates her – she wants to jump on him, only to punch him in the face, of course – she wants –

“I can handle it.”

“I do not doubt your survival skills. But I made a promise to your mother, and I would like to keep it.”

So, it's about her mother. Not her.

“You're an asshole.”

“Thank you.”

“You treat me like a child and _I can't stand it_ – ”

“You _are_ a child.”

“And you are a _killer_ ” she spits, grinding her teeth.

Erik tenses. “I don't deny it.”

“My mother told me you were a hitman, _before.”_

“I was.”

“This doesn't make you more capable than me in this shitty world, understood?”

He makes no reply. He breathes lightly, his back on her, while she glares at him. (She doesn't admit that she is tormented by a sickness called fascination, desire. It is the by far the most sweet and terrifying feeling she has ever experienced.)

“Just stay alive, Meg.”

She frowns. Has he noticed that she has never called him by his name? Something would get broken if she did. Or maybe she is more afraid of what would happen if the fault lines embroidered on their skins smashed against each other, like waves on the rocks.

 

 

**v.**

 

Ever more often they converse in the dark, under their breath – as though they could disturb the night – imagining above their heads a starry sky instead of the ceiling, in some house that they have properly disinfested.

They talk about what it was and will never be; what could have been if…

He describes to her the foreign cities he visited, and she explains how dance was the only discipline of which she could stand the rules. They talk about Meg's ballet company, her _friend with benefits;_ how Erik's mother has always been helpless before her inability to love her wrong son.

Erik is a resourceful genius: he speaks uncountable languages, is a great musician, a somehow architecture, art, literature and science scholar all at once, and delights her with many anecdotes Meg would have never believed to be in need of.

He is a brilliant ventriloquist: it is thanks to his tricks that Meg smiles for the first time since the beginning of the end.

“Why did you choose to kill, with all the knowledge you possess? Money clearly isn't the issue here.”

Erik's eyes flash in the darkness. “They thought me a monster. If that was the case, I might as well be a real one.”

“I think it's a rather simplicistic point of view.”

“Maybe I _am_ a monster after all.” He finishes with a sigh.

The only thing Meg is certain of is that Erik, monster or not, is and remains a loveless creature.

 

 

**vi.**

 

They have arrived. It is nothing but a shed, but it has a roof and resistant walls, and a floor certainly hard and uncomfortable to rest upon.

And, above all, no dead inside.

It's cold, and Meg bites her lip to not chatter her teeth and show any sign of yielding; in vain. Erik wraps her up in more blankets (every one they have managed to salvage in their _scavenger adventures_ ) and he would clearly offer to warm her with his body if it wasn't as cold as ice.

She asks: “What will you do while I resemble a human burrito?”

“The cold doesn't bother me.”

Minutes trickle away in silence. Meg would like to break it, to take her mind off the cold and the boredom ( _and to hear his voice pour crystal tears in her sensitive drums_ ) but she has no idea about what to say. Unless –

“Delight me with one of your many virtues.”

The borders of Erik's thin lips unfold lightly. “Like an entertainer to an Empress' court.”

“Just help me banish the boredom, please.”

He keeps on smiling, this time in a softer way that makes her ache inside – a pleasant aching.

Then he uncloses his lips and starts singing.

Even if Meg were good with words – and she isn't – she couldn't fully describe the unparalleled beauty of his voice. It's an angel whispering in the wings of her heart; it's Mida and turns every note it hits into gold.

When the aria is complete, Meg finds herself pushing back insidious tears, and blinks like before a blinding light.

“I didn't know you could sing” she mumbles.

“One of my _many virtues,_ as you kindly put it.”

“But singing like this…”

She approaches him slowly, with a feline pose; Erik trembles when she touches his hand. She interlaces their fingers, and he watches them like they were a miracle.

“You're not a monster. Do you hear me? _You're not a monster._ ”

“Meg…” He brings her hand to his chest, at the level of his heart. It's the centre of a burning supernova, and he has tears in his eyes.

( _And she is even more drawn to him – she falls in him and there she loses herself_ – )

“You don't need to protect me, Erik, or to make me survive. Help me _live._ ”

It's the first time she speaks his name aloud, and they both shudder.

“I need to confess you that I am an absolutely selfish creature in this regard, and I like to protect those whose death I would mourn.”

Then he adds, in only just more than a breath: “Correction: it would _kill_ me.”

They hold onto each other for countless minutes, and for a moment Erik's heart is _whole_ under her palm, and pulses fiercely. Heedless of the cold, the discomforts, the fact that they may die tomorrow in many different ways.

In a world where everything is dead, he strangely appears to her as the sign of life, a flame, a guiding light, alive and safe.

**Author's Note:**

> This idea popped up in my mind when a friend sent me a prompt ("You don't need to protect me") on Tumblr. I'm not an English native speaker, but another (British) friend checked it out for mistakes and corrected it a little, so it should be fine. I had the time of my life writing this! I hope you enjoyed it. I'd like to say the "my" Meg has the dark hair, skin and eyes described in Leroux, but is about 23-24 years old. I've written a very long Merik fic in my native language (Italian) that had some positive reception, and so I'm used to write these characters (I love them), but if there is something off in their characterizations (especially Erik's), feel free to tell me.  
> Also, Erik's name means "eternal ruler" and has Germanic/Norse origins, but its first element means indeed "always, one, alone".  
> Thanks for reading!


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